Surely you know I am speaking of ordinary citizens not being willing to stand up to any show of force from their own military. Our whole nation has the most powerful military in the history of mankind. All of these scenarios are based upon the premise they are coming from someone who is claiming to hold power legitimately while they are not. A flyby from a war plane (presumably authorized by the national leader) is a pretty good show of force.
Please refrain from changing this into some absurd and obviously unintended scenario. Thank you very kindly.
I think we’re still focusing too much on how Trump seizes power for a 2nd term, when the OP was asking what the nation’s reaction would be after Trump seizes power for a 2nd term. In other words, we are fussing too much about how a cake is baked when the cake is assumed to be baked; fighting the hypothetical.
And I don’t think there would be civil war or much insurrection; I think most of the nation would unhappily go along with it, like sheep.
I was thinking there was some level of appearing legitimate also. I just assumed it would eventually elevate to a protest, a standoff, and military or police intervention. My example was to demonstrate what a pathetically small portion of our forces it would take to gain complete control.
I’ll admit I’m not seeing a lot of difference between the idea that country would be helpless before the power of one tank or one airplane and the idea that the country would be helpless before the power of ten soldiers. All of these seem equally absurd to me.
Flynn may have been a wack job but he was also a 3 star General who didn’t take his oath seriously and hid his willingness to violate the Constitution.
When or if anti-Trump people see the TV news or read the headline that “anti-Trump crowd of protesters hit by Reaper drone strike; 27 killed,” they are going to think real seriously about whether they want to protest in the streets or not.
Of course, such violence might spur them to protest all the harder. But many would gulp and question whether the risk was worth it.
I gave my opinion back in my first post in this thread. I am speculated that whatever means Trump used to seize power would be seen as illegitimate by most Americans. And I feel somebody - Biden would be the obvious choice - would begin organizing non-violent resistance to Trump’s illegitimate presidency in order to pressure him to leave office. I suggested peaceful protests and general strikes as possible strategies for this.
You and I appear to be in disagreement over this issue. It’s a matter of speculation so we can’t say who’s right. Personally, I think the result would be the latter alternative you noted. I feel a massacre of peaceful protestors by soldiers would just spur greater protests. I feel Americans are more likely to get angry and fight back against an enemy than to surrender after the first bloodshed. We’re pretty stubborn; enemies have found they have to kill us for years before we finally give up.
I don’t disagree with this. There is a reason why he was fired from his job as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (by President Obama) and forced to retire a year earlier than he had planned.
His treasonous conduct after leaving the U.S. Army was even worse.
This is because, for many years, Americans have never faced an enemy who could really pose a threat to them anywhere and everywhere on American soil itself. Pearl Harbor was an attack on Hawaii; people living in Chicago weren’t threatened. 9/11 was an attack by a foreign terrorist group that hit New York City, etc., but what were the odds of the average American being killed by al-Qaeda? Astronomically low.
But if people see TV news or read headlines about people being drone-bombed on the streets of Portland or Washington DC because they were rioting/protesting against President Trump and how Trump has announced that all such protests against him will be droned as well, such a threat would hit far closer to home. Because if you are in Dallas reading that news, you realize you could also get drone-killed if you participate in an anti-Trump protest in Dallas. Or in Boston if in Boston. The threat is not 6,000 miles away, it’s immediate.
This would be compounded by the fact that there is no effective civilian defense against a Reaper drone. With 9/11, Americans could take comfort in the fact that the U.S. military could fight the Taliban. But if Trump orders every anti-Trump protest to be droned, what are you or I going to do about it? We’'d have nothing but guns against drones, almost impossible to hit.
There’s a reason there has never been a major Tienanmen-type protest in China again after the tanks rolled over and the machine guns shot 2,000+ in Beijing thirty-one years ago.
As another former junior officer I’ll endorse everything @robby has said. Including the implication that there are a few totalitarian-favorable guys with stars on their shoulders. Well hidden guys now who could become a problem if they’re invited to raise their hands and then get elevated by Trump into the right spots.
Having said that, it doesn’t e.g. take 10 people to launch one airplane to terrorize a protest. It takes a thousand people all up and down a huge chain of command to do lots of little tasks that end with a couple pilots launching off to commit a war crime against their fellow citizens. Or that end with a few tanks in the streets.
In the pre-internet pre-social media era it might be possible for “orders from headquarters” to be passed down layer by layer with a fake cover story about putting down an insurrection that would be believed by enough cogs in the system to get iron in motion. Nowadays every trooper, every Sergeant, every Captain, every Colonel will have at least an inkling that things are not as they seem and these orders and their pretenses stink.
Are there a bunch of jingoistic rightists in the military? You bet. There are also a lot of genuine constitutional patriots.
IMO … DoD won’t back what amounts to a coup. Might the various federal police / FBI / DEA / XYZ we’ve never heard of? I have no idea.
I feel the difference is that the communist regime had already been in power for forty years when they had troops attack protesters at Tiananmen Square. That means most Chinese people accepted the existence of the regime, even if they may not have liked it. So the communists weren’t trying to seize power; they already were in power. It was the students who were trying to change the political system.
I feel in a situation like the OP described, Trump would be seen as the person trying to change the political system and seize power. Even if he declared he was legitimately staying on as President for a second term, I believe most people would feel that Biden had won the election and was the legitimate President. So Trump would not have the advantage of legitimacy when he gave orders to the people whose support he would need.
I would expect a lot of civil unrest. You’d see parts of some cities becoming effectively ungovernable, more CHAZ-type autonomous zones.
Definitely some states would feel free to give the federal government the middle finger. But it would be in a lowkey way. I don’t think we’d see an 1860-type civil war happening again.
I’m kind of split as to whether Trump would go big as far as drone strikes or whatever. The bag-and-grab stuff they did this summer was pretty frightening, but small scale.
By far, what would worry me most would be white militias. They would feel emboldened to indulge their vigilante style of political activism, there would be no consequences for them to fear. We might see straight-up lynchings organized on Facebook, just like “hey, jump in my truck at 9 with your guns, we’re going to go citizens-arrest people in the socialist neighborhood across town”, and the cops would be like “seems bad, not my jurisdiction though”. I think that stuff would get bigger, more organized, more public, and more dangerous.
It is not so much whether the military will perform an illegal act against the citizens they have sworn to protect, as it is whether will they obey if told to stand down when the citizens they have sworn to protect are attacked by others foreign and/or domestic.
They’re not indestructible you know. I suspect there would be way more than enough angry veterans out there with the knowledge of how to destroy a tank with improvised weapons to make that tank nothing but a big target.
Plus, tanks have to have infantry support for that very reason; a buttoned up tank has very limited visibility, and still has vulnerable spots. So you’re going to need a company or so of infantry I’d guess. And the troops to support them and maintain the tank. And get it where you want it.
This isn’t a simple “let’s get a platoon of Marines there, and we have it made” kind of thing; using active-duty troops for this kind of thing would require more than just some dumb-ass junior officers deciding to throw their lot in with Trump. It would probably take field grade officers and a few flag officers.
And that’s assuming that the others don’t turn on them; your one tank or air strike might well be opposed by NG or even active duty units who are still loyal to the Constitution.
It’s important to keep in mind that the members of the armed forces aren’t robots who will blindly follow any orders they are given. They’re also going to be making decisions about whether an order to fire on American civilians is legal.
Trump may be able to fire enough generals that he can eventually find one who will give the order to attack a peaceful demonstration. But then he has to find soldiers who will carry out that order. If Trump has to fire half his generals, he has a problem. If he has to fire half his soldiers, he has a crisis.
You don’t think under such circumstances the quality and character of soldiers would change? Historically, despots and tyrants haven’t had to recruit very hard to find goons and thugs to be their enforcers.
It’s also difficult to imagine what sort of “crisis” Trump would care about.
One thing people seem to be forgetting is that almost half the people voted for Trump. On some level, most support him and probably don’t view themselves as “Nazis”. Heck, I would imagine that most Germans who followed Hitler didn’t view themselves as stooges to history’s greatest monster.